Recycling bits of copper

[Matty F]

Somebody usually comes up with better ways of doing things, but here's what I did - for the cost of four rivets!

I needed to make a couple of copper electrical fingers that were missing from a motor controller, and found some suitable copper in the scrap bin. There's a piece of phosphor bronze for a spring. Since there's maybe 100 amps to conduct, that's too much current for the spring or it will get hot and lose its springiness, so I made a few layers from the pure copper shim shown at the top. The finger itself I cut from the piece of bar and bent it and rivetted it with copper rivets (new ones!)

The new finger is on the left, and an original one on the right:

two new fingers in place on the controller, at the far left: fingers simply change the direction of the current and are not switched while the power on.

Here's the whole controller. The fingers at the bottom change the voltage going to the motor while it's operating, so they have to be bigger:

for these controllers are not available any more so need to be fabricated. Copper and brass are quite nice to work with, but are easily dented with steel tools. I made a brass hammer to use instead of a steel hammer.

[Chris J Dixon]

Another fine piece of work.

Chris

[MuddyMike]

Nice bit of DIY, thanks for sharing.

Mike

[John]

Your ingenuity and workmanship never cease to amaze me! I certainly hope someone realizes what a genius they have :-)

[Tabby]

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nice one :)

NT